Lokasenna
02-18-2009, 12:56 PM
I see the pulsating masses of humanity;
The ling’ring echo of some sad fatality,
Those long forgotten children that bleed and have bled,
Their gushing, weeping prayers of the obscene sacred.
Those black walls – so black! – define, confine the mind,
The thudding mantra more than kin and less than kind,
The pointless beat, the mindless noise, the vacuous despair,
The shuffling dead that long to feel the rush of dawning air.
We are empty, we are the ghosts in the smoke,
That flare and sputter from unburning, varnished oak,
And so we move with a transient violence,
A sad majesty of surpassing eloquence,
That is soon defeated by age and infirmity,
A mewling cry in the silence of eternity;
Oh, we are the lost music, notes without a score,
The orchestra dreamed - before we are, we are no more.
Is it a dream? Or the memory of a dream?
The sudden reality of a rushing stream,
The people (the people!) alive with movement,
The beating heart that increment after increment,
Pulls me gradually back into my essential self,
Back to the comfort of mundane, worldly pelf.
And yet what was this vision, this noon day-dream?
A vision of how things are, or how things seem?
I don't usually do this sort of poetry, so its quite an experiment for me - what do you think?
The ling’ring echo of some sad fatality,
Those long forgotten children that bleed and have bled,
Their gushing, weeping prayers of the obscene sacred.
Those black walls – so black! – define, confine the mind,
The thudding mantra more than kin and less than kind,
The pointless beat, the mindless noise, the vacuous despair,
The shuffling dead that long to feel the rush of dawning air.
We are empty, we are the ghosts in the smoke,
That flare and sputter from unburning, varnished oak,
And so we move with a transient violence,
A sad majesty of surpassing eloquence,
That is soon defeated by age and infirmity,
A mewling cry in the silence of eternity;
Oh, we are the lost music, notes without a score,
The orchestra dreamed - before we are, we are no more.
Is it a dream? Or the memory of a dream?
The sudden reality of a rushing stream,
The people (the people!) alive with movement,
The beating heart that increment after increment,
Pulls me gradually back into my essential self,
Back to the comfort of mundane, worldly pelf.
And yet what was this vision, this noon day-dream?
A vision of how things are, or how things seem?
I don't usually do this sort of poetry, so its quite an experiment for me - what do you think?